Open-source Agora alternatives

LiveKit is an open-source platform for realtime audio, video and data, aimed at developers building voice, video and AI agent applications. This repository holds the LiveKit server, a distributed WebRTC selective forwarding unit (SFU) written in Go on top of the Pion WebRTC implementation.

People, devices and AI agents join the same room as participants, and agents can be dispatched into rooms automatically or on demand. The server offers speaker detection, simulcast and selective subscription, uses JWT for authentication, and handles UDP, TCP and TURN connectivity. SDKs cover web, mobile, desktop, embedded and server environments, and a separate Agents framework in Python and Node.js supports code-first voice agents.

The server ships as a single binary and can be deployed with Docker or Kubernetes on your own infrastructure under the Apache 2.0 license. The vendor also runs LiveKit Cloud, a managed service that handles deployment and observability.

Janus is a general purpose WebRTC server developed by Meetecho and published as open source. It is aimed at developers who need server-side support for real-time audio, video and data applications such as video conferencing, rather than at end users looking for a finished meeting product.

The server is written in C and exposes its API over several optional transports, including REST through libmicrohttpd, WebSockets through libwebsockets and RabbitMQ messaging. WebRTC data channels are available through the usrsctp library, and optional BoringSSL support is built with cmake. The main branch holds the multistream version of Janus, while the older 0.x line is kept as a separate legacy version.

Janus targets Linux and can also be compiled for macOS. Windows is not supported natively, although it is reported to work under the Windows Subsystem for Linux, and the maintainers warn against unofficial executable builds. It is released under GPL-3.0 and must be built from source with dependencies such as GLib, libnice, OpenSSL and libsrtp.

Ant Media Server is a scalable media server for low-latency live streaming. It supports WebRTC with a claimed latency of about half a second, along with SRT, RTMP, RTSP, HLS and CMAF low-latency HLS, and also handles H.265/HEVC. Developers use it to build real-time video applications and live broadcasting.

Capabilities include adaptive bitrate workflows, transcoding, recording and cloud auto-scaling. SDKs are provided for iOS, Android, React Native, Flutter, Unity and JavaScript, and security features include SSL/TLS, token authentication, IP filtering and watermarking. The README lists use cases such as telehealth, e-learning, sports streaming, auctions and interactive applications.

The project is split into a Community edition with the essentials and an Enterprise edition that adds advanced features and support, and a free trial of the Enterprise edition is offered. It is written in Java, and documentation covers installation, API references and tutorials.

OpenVidu is a self-hosted real-time video and audio stack built on LiveKit and mediasoup by a team with long experience in WebRTC. It ships as two products. OpenVidu Meet is a ready-to-use video conferencing application and an open-source alternative to Zoom, Google Meet, and Jitsi Meet, with rooms, recordings, chat, screen sharing, and moderation. The code is released under the Apache-2.0 license.

OpenVidu Meet can be branded with your own name, logo, and colors, with per-participant feature choices, and embedded into your own application through a web component, driven from your backend with a REST API and webhooks. OpenVidu Platform provides programmable client and server SDKs for custom WebRTC apps with low-level media control, and it is API-compatible with LiveKit, so LiveKit SDKs work unchanged.

Both products are self-hosted only, deployable on AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle, DigitalOcean, or on-premises, with no hosted SaaS tier. OpenVidu PRO is a paid self-hosted edition, and the team offers support and consultancy. Advanced features include recording, RTMP streaming egress, AI agents for transcription and translation, and virtual backgrounds.